Tell it Proud

This episode is a replay of a live performance from Change My Mind: a live storytelling experience in NYC. This story is about my beliefs about neighbors changing over my life, from growing up as an outsider in Utah to surviving a building fire because of neighbors in NYC. This story highlights the beautiful and complicated role neighbors can play in all of our lives.

This episode highlights The Heart of a Woman which is an autobiographical and courageous act of self-trust as a memoir of Maya Angelou's life from 1957 to 1962. She writes about the turns and lessons of her dynamic life during a dangerous and divided time in the U.S, and it's filled with famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X. The Heart of a Woman sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent prose on her fondest dreams, deepest disappointments, and her dramatically tender relationship with her rebellious teenage son. Vulnerable, humorous, tough, Maya speaks with an intimate awareness of the heart within all of us.

This episode is a replay of a live performance from Change My Mind: a live storytelling experience in NYC from Hope Alcocer, who is a two-time author, speaker, certified mental health coach, and award-winning marketing strategist with 15 years of experience helping Fortune 500s, startups, and purpose-driven brands tell stories that move people. A Midwest girl turned New Yorker, she bought a one-way ticket to NYC over a decade ago and never looked back. Today, her most meaningful work is The Mia Joy Foundation, a nonprofit she's launching in honor of her daughter to support families through grief and infant loss. This story is about opening the door to grief instead of running from it, and discovering strength after losing loved ones. Trigger warning this episode discusses parental loss and infant loss.

We ingest thousands of messages every single day, from 30 second social media hot takes and news headlines, to billboards and printed advertisements we may glance at while hustling about our neighborhoods, to our favorite TV shows and movies we cozy up to on the couch in the evenings. All of these messages impact how we feel, think, and behave in both positive and negative ways, including our beliefs and practices of democracy. In this episode we explore a media report that examined the media consumption of 130,000 streaming platform users, watching nearly 29,000 individual programs, to understand the prevalence of government-themed media and how different themes around democracy and authoritarianism impact different values-based audiences.

The Black Masking Indian Tradition during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, developed through early encounters between the region's Indigenous and Black communities. This tradition has continued within the Black communities of New Orleans, with many participants being mixed race descendants of Black and Indigenous ancestry who self-identify as Black Indians. In this episode we highlight Flagboy Giz is an innovative musician, internationally-celebrated bead artist, and member of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Black Masking (Mardi Gras) Indian tribe who has been a leader in keeping up this undertold history and tradition.

The Message is an incredibly timely and powerful book by Ta-Nehisi Coates that highlights the moral depth of what it means to be a writer, and what responsibilities we have when we put ideas into the world we hope others adopt and understand. As someone passionate about how much storytelling shapes every aspect of being human, this book deepened my understanding of the calling of writing. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this episode explores the message which is incredible work from one of the country's most important writers about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

You can be in a room full of people, and feel lonely as hell. One reason for this is a lack of attunement. Attunement is how we connect deeply with another person and allow them to 'feel felt.' It's genuine curiosity about someone else's dreams, ideas, desires, feelings, goals, and wants. Many people have limited capacity for genuine attunement in their relationships, but it's one of the most meaningful ways we can build close relationships. This episode dives into this concept and also shares an original poem inspired by these topics.

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Belonging is a fundamental need, often found in dense community ties and emotionally close relationships. Yet many of these same spaces we hope to find belonging from, often demand conformity and betraying our own needs and values, for full acceptance. In this episode I share a bit about how true belonging is being fully witnessed, recognized, and accepted for who you are and what you have to share, without extreme compromise, as well as share an original poem inspired by these ideas.

What is trust? The simplest definition I drummed up after noodling, researching, and mind hashing this eons old question, is something or someone safely fulfilling its responsibilities and commitments with consistency, honesty, and integrity. We are constantly tasked with extending trust because we have to trust in hundreds of things in our daily lives just to function. This episode describes how trust is a paradox of risk and vulnerability, a delicate balance of extending faith, as well as discernment, hoping we choose the people and things that will bring security and safety, while avoiding betrayals and pain, and how we cannot function at our highest levels without trust, and also includes an original poem examining the intergenerational challenges in building and having trust.

Today's episode is an essay I wrote titled "we need to rebrand racism" because we have plenty of racism but supposedly no racists. The term racist was coined in 1935 and I've come up with three new terms we should use: shadow shame, melanin averse, pigment piqued, to beat racists at their own coopting word game. This episode looks into the history of language and it's power when we take it back.